Unfortunately, your preconceived notions of the economy will be dealt with by the full extent of the market. Plan accordingly.

The Best and Worst Stock and Option Trading APIs

In my quest to program and build my own trading system, I have discovered a lot of conflicting information on the “Internets” about trading APIs and stock and option price quotes. In the past, I posted on HN news about some of my findings, only to get some great new insights. One thing I can’t find is a simple location for all trading APIs and I have stumble along some rabbit holes when dealing with the APIs, trying to see what works and what is no longer supported. With that said, I will will be launching a General information Git Repository, to hopefully provide links to SDK for trading API and price quote APIs, Etc. I will obviously do pull requests, but my opinions and finding on certain trading systems will be detailed below and on this site.

Finally, having built successful trading systems and algorithms, some of my work can be found here. I’m available for hire at Upwork or via email.

Etrade has and an API, it doesn’t seem to be very well supported.
Meaning it came out in I think 2012 and it hasnt been updated recentley
(like the last few years).

Pros:

Sand box environment: I only made it to the sand box. Which really
isn’t a test/development environment. It’s an environment that no matter
what stock price you query it will return quotes for Apple, Google or
Microsoft. This really isn’t a true testing environment.

4 thoughts on “The Best and Worst Stock and Option Trading APIs”

Thank you for this article, I am just getting started developing a trading system.
I currently use Etrade and Fidelity. Fidelity doesnt seem to have any API. Etrade does, but now I am concerned about if I should try to use it or just open an account with IB or Ally?

Etrade really doesn’t have a supported API.I definately would try to steer clear of that. Ally API works pretty well for basic trading, but it doesn’t have a paper trading account. IB really is the only game in town, but there is quite a learning curve at the beginning.

Interactive brokers python api and the api in general is poorly documented, buggy and slow. If you try to contact support, they will tell you to stop asking why it’s broken. What a bunch of uselessness.